


burnt through by an inhuman tear

by ThamesNymph



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 07:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21388525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThamesNymph/pseuds/ThamesNymph
Summary: Aziraphale finds Crowley reading (despite his protestations that he doesn't read). Revelations and confrontations on the subject of love ensue. Starring Lermontov's poetry.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	burnt through by an inhuman tear

**Author's Note:**

> I already wrote one story about how Aziraphale and Crowley are brought together through reading Milton, but I guess I just can't get enough of them being brought together by poetry. This time it's Mikhail Lermontov, my personal favourite Romantic.

Crowley likes to declare that he doesn’t read, but, as Aziraphale well knows, along with ‘I’m not nice’, ‘I don’t give people rides in the Bentley’, and ‘no I’m not making you tea’, this isn’t strictly true. For some reason, Crowley has decided that being seen reading will damage his ‘ultra-cool’ persona, something that Aziraphale hasn’t had the heart to tell him has virtually no existence outside the demon’s own very vivid imagination. So most of Crowley’s reading is done on the sly, with guilty starts when discovered, and failed attempts to shove his book out of sight and pretend he was doing something else. 

Aziraphale, coming out of his back room, where he had been carefully secreting a vintage set of Swinbourne’s poetry, in case some customers dare to attempt to buy the precious tomes, found Crowley sitting on his desk, reading a very small volume. Aziraphale knew every book in his shop by sight, and so he was immediately aware that it was not one of his books, and must therefore be Crowley’s own. He was so surprised at this that he forgot his part in maintaining the fiction of Crowley’s non-reading by pretending to not see any book-related activity from the demon, and exclaimed,

‘What’s that book?’

As usual, Crowley jumped, upset a precariously-stacked set of volumes on Italian architecture of the fifteenth century, and denied any involvement with reading matter.

‘Book? What book? There isn’t any book!’

A very ridiculous statement to make in a bookshop, Aziraphale thought.

‘_This_ book!’ he said, fishing the small volume out. ‘Your book.’

‘_Mine?_’ Crowley said. ‘No, no. Don’t own books. Don’t read books. No books!’

And he went off, muttering to himself, and leaving the book behind.

‘Crowley, this isn’t mine!’ Aziraphale called after him.

‘No, no, must be yours. Don’t own books!’

And Crowley disappeared through the door. Clearly, caught between the desire to reclaim the book, and the need to maintain his persona, he had chosen the latter. He couldn’t let himself be compromised by admitting that he _read things_!

Aziraphale, meanwhile, opened the book curiously. To his surprise, it wasn’t in English, as he had been prepared for. It took his brain a few seconds to recalibrate before he recognised the language as Russian and began to read.

[Aziraphale could, of course, read and speak any language on earth. He chose not to understand French on principle]

It was Mikhail Lermontov’s long poem _The Demon_, published in a small tome with expensive leather binding. Aziraphale, of course, knew it well, but was surprised that Crowley did. It detailed the passion of a demon for a mortal, and asserted that fallen angels had the capacity to love. No wonder Crowley had attempted to deny all knowledge of it. As Aziraphale flicked through the pages, he found himself wondering what had drawn Crowley to this book, did Crowley, perhaps, ever _love_? Aziraphale shook himself. That was impossible, Crowley wasn’t that type of demon. Melodramatic, of course, but melancholy, brooding, yearning? No, not at all, Crowley was all energy and swagger and chatter. 

Suddenly, Aziraphale noticed that several lines had been marked out in the margin by a red pen. Momentarily pausing to mentally disapprove to writing in books with pens, Aziraphale could not stop himself from reading the section, although he felt slightly guilty about it. This was clearly Crowley’s own private book, with his own private notes, and he felt that he shouldn’t been looking. He looked anyways.

Love’s swooning and love’s agitation –  
for the first time the Demon now  
experienced them; in shock and shiver  
he thinks of fleeing – but no quiver  
stirs in his wing! from his dimmed brow  
a heavy teardrop, a slow river…  
what marvel! till today, quite near  
that cell, there stands in wondrous fashion  
a stone scorched by a tear of passion,  
burnt through by an inhuman tear!

Aziraphale stared, then read the section again. Partly, he was swept away by the beauty of the words, and wondering what tortured echoes they called up in the undisclosed, unguessed vistas of Crowley’s soul. The idea that Crowley, right before his eyes and yet completely unbeknownst to him, might have been, might at this very moment be, suffering, weeping, tormented, was making Aziraphale feel something between terror and guilt, congealing into a strong desire to rush after Crowley and hold his angular, slithery form very tightly in his arms for a very long time. But also, the image of the burnt-through stone in the poem was reminding him of something he had seen, something very recent…

Aziraphale got up, walked a bit closer to the door, and looked down at the floor. Yes, there, in front of him, was a tiny hole in the flooring, completely burnt through, which had not been there earlier. He had first noticed it right after the bookshop had returned from its incineration, and had assumed that it was some tiny patch of floor that Adam had neglected to ‘fix’. He knelt down to look at the hole more closely. It was perfectly round, the edges blackened. Could it possibly be… the mark of a demon’s tear?

Crowley, he knew, had gone to the bookshop to look for him and had snatched the _Nice and Accurate Prophesies_ out of the blaze, but the demon had refused to talk about it and had brushed aside all questions about his visit to the flaming bookshop. And suddenly, Aziraphale remembered his conversation with Crowley in the bar, where he had been busily testing the limits of what a supernatural body can endure in terms of alcoholic consumption. ‘I lost my best friend’, Crowley had said. He had assumed that he meant some human that Crowley knew, but now he wondered. Was it possible that the ‘best friend’ had been… himself? The possibility felt like a revelation, like someone had just switched a light on in a room that he hadn’t even realised was dark. And of course, how like Crowley to be evasive, not to say, ‘I thought I lost you,’ but ‘I lost my best friend’, unwilling, even when drunk, to compromise himself, to give himself away.

Aziraphale looked at the book he was still holding again. ‘Best friend’ was one thing, but the passage did say ‘love’s swooning and love’s agitation’. If he accepted the hypothesis of the demon’s tear burning through the floor, then he had to accept that the only thing to make a demon weep was… love. 

This was too much. Aziraphale’s usual solution with regards to any conflicts or misunderstandings was to disappear for a couple of decades, and wait for everything to just sort of resolved itself. But he had been doing this for hundreds, no, thousands of years, and perhaps it was time to catch up with the times. He remembered telling Crowley, ‘you go too fast for me’. It wasn’t just Crowley, it was the whole world, going too fast, doing reckless things, making bad decisions, and he just wanted everything to _slow down_. But perhaps he could try, for once, going faster himself. Perhaps just this once, he could allow himself to yield to that small part of him that wanted to act instead of hide.

So he took the book, marched purposefully out of the shop, locked the door, and started walking towards Crowley’s flat. It wasn’t too far away, and Aziraphale didn’t let himself stop for a moment, because he knew that if he stopped, he would start to think, and if he started to think he would start to hesitate, and if he started to hesitate, he would end with doing nothing at all.

He knocked on the door of Crowley’s flat. No answer. He knocked again, just to be polite. Still no answer.

‘Crowley!’ he called, ‘Crowley, it’s me!’

Silence.

‘Crowley, please open the door!’

He tried the handle. It wouldn’t give. He attempted to miracle the lock open. It wouldn’t give either. Crowley had obviously worked on protecting his door from any unearthly intruders, whether celestial or infernal. So Aziraphale simply removed the entire door by almost blasting it (but as politely as possible) off its hinges. It revealed a stunned-looking Crowley standing in his entrance hall, staring at him in outrage.

‘You – you – ‘ he stuttered, somewhere between rage and amazement. ‘You – _my door!!_’

‘My apologies, dear boy,’ Aziraphale said calmly, stepping over the splintered wreckage that had, a few seconds ago, been the door to Crowley’s flat. ‘But you know, you could have just answered the door.’

‘What kind of person – angel – whatever,’ Crowley spluttered, gesticulating wildly, ‘just _blasts_ the fucking _door_ off because they want a bloody _chat?!_’

‘There’s really no need for that kind of language, dear boy,’ Aziraphale went on, ‘I came to talk to you about this,’ and he held out the Lermontov volume.

Crowley fell silent, then went pale, then went red, then looked as if he would very much like the floor and the earth to open and deposit him into the comforting, sulphurous dungeon of the very deepest pit of Hell.

Finally, he brought out, ‘You destroyed my door because you wanted to talk about some book that’s been sitting in your shop?’

‘Crowley, you know very well that it’s your book.’

‘Rubbish,’ Crowley scoffed, sounding extremely nervous and supremely unconvincing, ‘you know I don’t _read_.’

‘Then why does it have your handwriting in it?’ Aziraphale inquired, showing Crowley his notes on the margins.

‘That’s… not my handwriting?’ Crowley said, now sounding downright questioning, as if he was begging to be informed which feeble excuse the angel would accept in lieu of a truthful answer. Aziraphale knew that he himself was probably the worst liar on earth, but Crowley must surely be a close second.

Aziraphale looked at him.

‘Oh, alright!’ Crowley yelled, turning away, ‘alright, so what do you want to do now, _talk about it_?’

‘Well… yes.’

‘I don’t bloody want to talk about it, alright? There’s nothing to say, not a single _fucking thing_. Now you know, and I know you know, and you know that I know that you know and oh _fuck!_’

‘Know what?’ Aziraphale questioned gently.

‘Don’t make me say it, angel, just don’t make me say it,’ Crowley’s voice was breaking.

‘Know _this_?’ Aziraphale asked, and held out the book, open to the page he had been reading, with the marked section.

Crowley took the book and stared at it. ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘that.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ Aziraphale said, and took a step forward.

Crowley started back. ‘Don’t – just don’t! I don’t want your _sympathy_! I know we can never… be friends now. Now that you know. So just – just leave, alright?’

He stared at Aziraphale in something like defiance, but as the angel stared back, his defences seemed to crumble and his eyes filled slowly with years. 

‘Please, angel,’ he whispered, ‘just go. I can’t stand it.’

‘What can’t you stand, Crowley?’

Aziraphale took a step forward, then another. Then he took one more step and was standing within an inch of the seemingly immobilised Crowley and, lifting his hand to the back to his head, kissed him, ever so gently, on the lips.

‘Is it this you can’t stand, my darling?’ he asked.

‘I – I – _what_??’ Crowley croaked.

‘Crowley, I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ Aziraphale said, stroking the back of the demon’s head. ‘I thought that, as a demon, you were incapable of love. Because that was what they said. In Heaven, you know. And I thought you would laugh if you found out I loved you. So I never said.’

‘You love – ‘

‘Yes, _yes_, my dear. Of course I do. I thought that all that time, you were just… playing with me. But you… you really love me.’

‘You absolute moron,’ Crowley moaned, resting his forehead against Aziraphale’s, ‘I’ve only been telling you for six thousand years.’

‘I couldn’t hear you. But I can always hear a poet.’

‘Thank god for the Romantics, then,’ Crowley sighed, as they, at last, kissed properly.

**Author's Note:**

> I used the text of Charles Johnson's translation of _The Demon_, which was the first one I could find. It seemed pretty good to me, but I read Lermontov in Russian, so I am not endorsing this translation as the best there is.


End file.
